Content marketing focuses on interacting with customers and prospects without selling. Rather, it is about creating valuable and educational content that consumers can benefit and learn from, and in exchange they will reward you with their loyalty and business.

Creating relevant content can be difficult and is often a large obstacle for marketers to overcome. Then, what happens when you have mastered content creation? Now that you have all of this content available for consumers, what should you do with it? Surprisingly, many businesses create content (without a sound strategy in place, no less) and then they stop there. Creating valuable content takes a lot of time and resources, and it is a waste for businesses to not take advantage of all that their created content has to offer. Here are 3 ways you can maximize content to take full advantage of the benefits:

1. Have a Strategy

Let’s take a step back, first, and delve back into the content creation process for a moment. Only 27% of B2C marketers and only 35% of B2B marketers in North America have put their content strategy into writing. This means that the majority of marketers are churning out content without a real strategy. How can you expect to see optimal results when you have no clear direction to follow? Before any content is created, a strategy should be developed that will then determine what type of content should be created and why. Once you have a content strategy in place, you can create your social strategy, and everything else should operate in harmony. It is possible to create content without a strategy, marketers do it all the time, but if you do so you are not maximizing your content. Take the time to develop your content strategy so you know who you’re targeting and how, and I promise you will see the results you’re looking for.

2. Distribution

Now that you’ve created relevant and valuable content, how can you get that content out to consumers? Take advantage of the social channels available and begin distributing your content. You should do this by following the social strategy you created from your content strategy mentioned previously. There are numerous social channels available for use, but it is hard to maintain them all well. Instead, choose the channels that best match your target market to distribute your content. Additionally, utilize email, blogging, and your website to distribute your content, too. It is so important to utilize the resources available to you and maximize distribution, which in turn will maximize your content. It is not enough to simply publish your content and wait for consumers to come find it. You are wasting your resources and are not taking advantage of the benefits that premium content has to offer by doing so. You will also want to think about how to distribute your content in a way that will break through the clutter and combat content blindness.

3. Repurpose Content

As I’ve said before, creating content takes a lot of time and resources. Though it is important to continuously create new relevant and valuable content for consumers, it is not always feasible. In order to take proper advantage of the premium content you’ve already created, look into ways that you can repurpose your current content. By creating a variety of content such as eBooks, whitepapers, infographics, and case studies, for example, you already have great resources to use in the future. You can either take pieces of previous content and turn them into a new content offer, or you can use this already existing content to promote new campaigns. Just because you’ve published something already doesn’t mean you can’t use it again, as long as it is still relevant and valuable to the consumer. In fact, if you aren’t repurposing content, you aren’t taking advantage of the hard work used to create it in the first place and you aren’t maximizing the content’s full potential for driving results.

Content is an integral component of inbound marketing. In order to maximize the content you create, you must first ensure you have a sound content strategy in place so that the content is serving its purpose in the overall scheme of the business. Then, distribution channels must be properly utilized so your content is reaching the right audience. Finally, content should be repurposed to create new content offers or promote new campaigns to consumers. I hope that by utilizing these 3 tips you are able to maximize your content in order to achieve your overall marketing and business goals.

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If Kelley isn’t hard at work for her clients she is hard at work at the dance studio. Kelley spends her spare time coaching a high school dance team. She was a dancer at the University of Colorado – Boulder, where she also graduated with a degree in business administration which helped prepare her for a career in marketing. She’s now an industry veteran with six years in various roles under her belt.